The society that was able to exist in primitive times was always the one that sacrificed the individual,[8] and the infant was naturally low in the scale of value. That very sacrifice of the weakest, stratified into a national characteristic, produced in the greatest civilization of ancient times, a narrow and egoistical morality, with little conception of what we call humanity. “No Greek ever attained the sublimity of such a point of view,” says George Henry Lewes.[9] In this, the “century of the child,” there is a great conception of humanity, and even of children’s rights. Little attempt, however, has been made to trace in consecutive and co-ordinate fashion the development among races and nations of the progress of the human race in its attitude toward children. We who are so much interested in the betterment of the race and who are so much moved by humanitarian considerations that almost the first consideration of the state is to provide for the children, have reached this point of view only after a long struggle against blind ignorance and reckless selfishness. The fact that less than fifty years have passed since we began a definite policy concerning the rights of children shows how rapidly the human race moves. The race may be, let us say, something like 240,000 years old; of that time civilized man—accepting the most generous figures on Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilization—has existed only 10,000 years, or 1/240 of the life of the human species. Humanized man has existed not more than a few hundred years, and it is within only fifty years that the race has been concerned with the protection of the child. How deeply ingrained are the habits of barbarity and darkness, may be seen from the fact that cannibalism broke out in Japan not more than a hundred years ago. Unquestionably, this is the century of the child. Undoubtedly, more serious thought is being given in the present generation to the subject than has ever been given before in the entire history of the world. More has been written about the child in the last fifty years than had been written in the world in all civilized times up to the beginning of this half-century. In order to appreciate this statement one must remember that the best friends of the child—Jesus, the Jewish Prophets, and Mohammed—lived centuries before the human theories that they preached had really a living existence. In this connection, it is germane to state that the theory that philosophy and religion go hand in hand with humanity, is shattered by the fact that Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, and Gautama affected, apparently, not a single jot, the ancient attitude of insufferance toward the undesired children.